Oliver Foot said he wanted to be “thoroughly used up” by the time he died - “The harder I work the more I live,” he said - and it was an ambition that he wholeheartedly fulfilled.
Though best known as president of Orbis International, the charity devoted to the prevention and cure of blindness in the Third World, the engaging and inexhaustible Foot had enjoyed a broad, highly colourful career path.
This included stints as a cowboy in Wyoming, as the director of a hippy theatre company in Cornwall that dramatised Cornish legends with the aid of giant puppets, and as a lobbyist for the International Union for Ladies’ Garment Makers in New York.
Charismatic and instinctively sociable, Foot was a gifted PR man who also guided troupes of journalists through the beauty spots of the Caribbean, especially his beloved birthplace Jamaica. He worked on behalf of Air Jamaica and Sandals Resorts for Gordon “Butch” Stewart, one of the region’s chief employers.
Foot’s favourite place was the small coffee farm he owned overlooking the Blue Mountains, and he considered himself a Jamaican citizen. He was born in 1946, in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of Sir Hugh Foot (later Lord Caradon). In later life Foot, when meeting a fellow islander, would astound casual acquaintances by breaking into a broad Jamaican patois.
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Oliver Isaac Foot was born in 1946, the third of four children. His brother Paul Foot would become a celebrated journalist (obituary, July 20, 2004). Despite hailing from distinguished socialist stock - the Labour leader Michael Foot was his uncle and two other uncles were also politicians - Oliver Foot sought his first career in the theatre. After Leighton Park School and the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, Foot went to Goddard College, Vermont, and while there discovered a calling to act. He also met his first wife, Nancy, during a 24-hour anti-Vietnam War rally.
In 1971, after acting classes in the US and London, Foot founded Footsbarn, a travelling theatre troupe based in a commune, which performed in village greens, car parks, halls and on beaches. Foot would don a top hat and use a megaphone to broadcast invitations to the public to witness such attractions as a swimming giraffe.
In 1975 he left Footsbarn, which is now based in France, and after a conversion to evangelical Christianity joined L’Abri Fellowship, an international Christian group with a base in Hampshire. He often preached in his local churches in Cornwall and Jamaica.
By the late 1970s Foot was operating a political lobbying service in London which briefed industrial clients on political proceedings in Westminster and advised them how best to influence UK legislation. In 1980 he transferred to New York. Then, on a Christmas break in the Caribbean, over a dinner with Edward Seaga, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, he met a distinguished ophthalmologist who told Foot of the work of Orbis International, a fledgeling charity set up to treat blindness in developing countries - where 90 per cent of the world’s blind people live.
Foot began to work for Orbis, swiftly becoming its executive director and president, and throwing himself into Orbis’ gruelling missions of three to four weeks to the developing world on the “flying eye hospital”, a fully equipped ophthalmic teaching hospital on an aircraft.
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This flies volunteer doctors and nurses to developing countries where they perform eye operations and teach their skills to local medical staff. “We never simply move in, cure and move on,” Foot explained. “Everything we do is intended to act as a catalyst.”
Orbis has treated more than 4.4 million blind people and trained more than 154,000 eye-care professionals in more than 85 countries worldwide, and Foot helped to raise more than $200 million for the charity.
Perhaps Foot’s greatest achievement, the result of his deep reserves of diplomacy, lay in having persuaded nations not naturally well disposed to the US to allow access to a charity whose headquarters were in New York. These include Cuba, and more recently Iran, which thanks largely to Foot’s sensitive approach has said it will allow Orbis into the country for the first time within a matter of weeks.
In 1995 Foot resigned from Orbis though he remained a member of the charity’s international board of directors and in England was chairman of the Orbis Charitable Trust. In 2004 he returned, as Orbis’ International’s president, a position held until his death.
Never still, feet tapping even while seated at the computer, Foot rose each day at 4am or 5am. He had a wide circle of close but socially disparate friends.
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He is survived by his second wife, Gail, a son and a daughter.
Oliver Foot, president of Orbis International, was born on September 19, 1946. He died of heart failure on February 6, 2008, aged 61